WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging application, has just released WordPress 3., codenamed Thelonious — the applications 13th release in its history. Beta releases have been available for the last few months, but now it’s official. To give an idea of how famous WordPress is, version 2.9 was downloaded 10.3 million times.
Among the features listed in the official blog post: a default theme named Twenty Ten (the old default was looking quite dated), a brighter interface, and 1,217 bug fixes. Theming has gotten quite a bit of attention, with APIs that make it simpler for design developers to allow for customized menus, post types, headings, backgrounds, and more.
One more big change is the fusing of WordPress Multi User (MU) and the core WordPress install. WordPress MU is a fork of WordPress that allows for one install to administer several (even millions) of blogs, but until now it was individual from ‘regular’ WordPress. Now you’ll get the functionality of both from the exact install.
One other useful stage: the WordPress blog notes that the team is going to “take a release cycle off” to focus on the things “around WordPress”
Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless.
Here’s a video showcasing some of 3.0′s new features: